Matilda Getrude Robbins (1887 – January 9, 1963) was a Russian-born American socialist labor organizer who first connected with the Industrial Workers of the World during the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Early life Tatiana Gitel Rabinowitz (According to the ship's manifest where names of entering immigrants are listed, Matilda's original given name was Taube (Yiddish or German for 'dove'; however, she claimed a Russian given name, Tanya.)Rabinowitz, Matilda "Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman," Cornell University Press was born in Lityn, Ukraine.Lawrence Bush, "July 8: Matilda Robbins and the IWW" Jewish Currents (July 7, 2013). She moved to New York with her family at age 13, in 1900. Her name was anglicized to Matilda Gertrude Robbins in the process of immigration.
Career
Robbins started working as a teenager in a shirtwaist factory, and worked various jobs from age 16 onward. In Bridgeport, Connecticut she made her first connections to the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Robbins became a key organizer during a strike in Little Falls, New York, running the strike office, organizing a strike kitchen, raising money and legal aid, and fortifying the picket line over the course of fourteen weeks. Robbins and activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were then hired by the IWW and spent three years traveling across the United States to assist with labor organizing."Revolt, They Said". www.andreageyer.info. Retrieved 2017-07-13."Matilda Robbins" Jewish Women's Archive (2017).
She was one of only two women organizers for the IWW during its early years, along with Flynn.Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (University of Illinois Press 1980): 132. She was arrested for her organizing work in East Liverpool, Ohio,"Miss Rabinowitz Gets into Trouble" Akron Beacon Journal (March 22, 1913): 1. via Newspapers.com in McKeesport, Pennsylvania,"I. W. W. Speaker Arrested" The Gazette Times (Pittsburgh) (August 9, 1913): 2. via Newspapers.com and in Detroit, Michigan, all in 1913.Steve Babson, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (Wayne State University Press 1986): 33. Later she was active in the IWW's Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee.Bennett Murashkin, "The Jewish Role in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)" LAWCHA.
Robbins wrote for the IWW publications for many years after leaving active organizing, and she ran the Socialist Party's Los Angeles office from 1945 to 1947.
Personal life Robbins had a longtime relationship with another labor organizer, Benjamin J. Legere (1887–1972).Steve Thornton, "A Labor of Love" Bridgeport Library/Bridgeport History Center. They were parents together of a daughter, Vita, born in 1919.Joyce Shaw Peterson, "Choosing Motherhood: Matilda Robbins' Story" Women's Studies 42(3)(2013): 271. Robbins died in 1963, aged 76 years, in Oakland, California. Her granddaughter Robbin Légère Henderson, an artist, prepared illustrations for the 2017 publication of Robbins's memoirs, from a manuscript written in the 1950s.Matilda Rabinowitz, Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman: A Memoir from the Early Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press 2017).
According to a 2020 Industrial Worker article, Legere was abusive and sometimes violent towards Robbins. They divorced in 1926.
References
External links A photograph of Robbins probably taken at the time of her arrest in Detroit, Michigan in the 1910s; in the collection of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. The Ben Legere Papers are also held in the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.